Last Saturday myself and Stephie headed down to Amersham Studios for our workshop ‘creating lighting with character workshop’.

We kick started the day with a seminar looking at various different images and discussing how each one was lit and what lighting types were used. We spent the morning looking through images I had shot with each lighting style and fitting each light into one of these three types. We spoke about how each lighting type makes us feel and why. The idea that the shadow placement is good way to identify lighting types was spoke about for a while and the concept that lighting is actuality all about shadow placement is a key element.

Once we had finished our discussion we set some lights up and put to practise what we talked about during the seminar. Personally speaking, I don’t think my work is that complicated when it comes to lighting. I mainly work with a combination of three lighting styles, Rembrandt, butterfly and split lighting. Once you have got the idea of Rembrandt, Butterfly and Split lighting the rest is about the finer placement and combination of these lighting types to produce things like clamshell and badger etc…    For me, I find that all the character and story of an image is all in the shadow.  Where I place the shadows is usually the most important element when photographing people.

If you think this workshop sounded like fun you should check out Amersham Studios for some other great workshops here.

The following BTS images by Simon Ellingwrth